judgement day; you haven’t been Raptured up into glory and neither has anyone else?

What happens when you’ve pulled your kids out of

school, resigned your job, sold your house to buy into the wagon train of doom trundling around America bringing the '‘good’ news of damnation & destruction to everyone?

Do you stand around muttering ‘oh…..er……well’, and wonder what to do next? You’ve spent years preparing yourself for teh 2nd coming and He's stood you up.

You’ve already written off humanity as a bad job deserving of damnation and tribulation (but not you). Everything humans do is poisoned, sinful, loathsome in God’s eyes; you’ve no hope for the future, no faith in all the endeavours of humanity to progress, to get better, to live at all. All that is pointless and you want it to end next Saturday.... and it doesn’t. What happens in your head?

Was it a mistake in the math? It’s still going to happen, right? The Bible can’t be wrong on this can it? No, that's not possible: there’s just been a temporary postponement: armageddon is on hold...….wait….it’s just been revealed to brother XYZ that the new date is to be..blah blah blah and we’ve been blessed with more time to get the new date for the apocalypse into as many peoples diaries as possible.

Is that what happens? You retrench into some miserable little end time cult, growing ever more dissociated from reality; alive in the world, but not living in it, part of humanity but taking no part in it.

But all that’s for later. What do you feel as the great day approaches? Fear, trepidation, expectancy, transcendent joy? What do youfeel for the unraptured, the damned: the ones that will be left behind to experience unspeakable levels of torture, terror and torment? They’re getting what they deserve, right? No need to feel bad for them.

And polls suggest that somewhere around 40% of Americans, (123 million people), believe in some such apocalyptic scenario, and many believe it will happen in their lifetime.

On one level this is funny, but on another it’s tragic - as well as bewildering: that so many can abrogate responsibility for humanity to some fantasy going on in their heads beggars belief.

The trouble is: the more they dream of heaven, the more likely becomes hell on earth.

07 May 2011

04 May 2011

I’m not doing a good job of working out how I feel about OBL flatlining at the bottom of the ocean.

Flat, actually, is about right.

I don’t feel like celebrating, I don’t feel any sense of closure, I don’t feel like the world is suddenly more secure, I don’t feel any thrill of retributive justice, despite the thousands and thousands of people who have died either directly or indirectly because of that insane lunatics skewed view of reality. I don’t feel like it’s drawn a line under anything or settled anything or nudged the world an inch closer to sanity.

In the decade since that dreadful Tuesday on Sept 11th, I’ve watched, listened and read about all the casualties of the ideological and religious warfare that’s plagued humanity for thousands of years. It never goes away. No politician will make it go away, no religion, no guru, no masters from outaspace, not the second coming, not Dr Who. It can only be made to go away by humanity coming to its senses one day.

01 May 2011

'Oh dear, oh dear. Not again!' exlaimed Alice, falling down another rabbit hole, this time promising to herself not to drinkanything that said 'DRINK ME' on the bottle, or to eat anything that said 'EAT ME' on the label, no matter how sugar coated or jam filled or otherwise tempting it looked.

She landed on a sand dune next to some, (possibly American, it was hard to tell), special services personnel operating laptops.

'What are you doing?' asked Alice, trying to shake the sand out of her dress.

'We're sending drones to attack the Gaddaffles with rockets,' answered one of them, poking the ENTER key with a grubby finger.

'Oh, I see,' said Alice, who didn't really at all. 'Will it hurt?'

'Oh, I expect so.... probably, very much.' said the soldier.

'But you won't actually be there to see?' queried Alice.

'Well, no, not exactly: but we will see it, sort of, on the screen,' said the soldier, turning his laptop round for Alice to watch the buildings explode on the little screen.

'Ahhh, I see,' said Alice 'it's a sort of computer game then? The Gadaffles must be very naughty,' observed Alice. '

'Some of them are VERY naughty and some of them are a bit naughty and some of them are not really all that naughty at all.' replied the one who seemed to be in charge.